


I Still Care For You

by bashert



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: AU, F/M, Sort of based on a prompt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-14 16:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2199012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bashert/pseuds/bashert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He knew pretty quickly that he had crossed a line. They both had said some things they might regret, but his fuse had always been much shorter than Mac's and he had always been good at wielding words as a weapon. She had been gone before his brain caught up with his mouth and then it was too late.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>First season AU. Mac shows up three years after their break up needing a job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hear me out

**Author's Note:**

> So this was vaguely based on a prompt from lilacmermaid25. As in the prompt inspired this. The prompt was: Will is the one who cheated, but MacKenzie still needs a job. Except there's no cheating here, just an alternate break up. The title comes from the song by Ray LaMontagne.

_Hear me out_

_Day follows day_

_Light turns to clay in my hands_

_How to explain,_

_So pristine the pain_

_It was kindness made the cut so clean_

_I still care for you-_ Ray LaMontagne

* * *

 

 

She was the last person he thought he'd see standing in the newsroom.

When Charlie told him (" _You know_ _her_.") Will hadn't quite believed him. MacKenzie McHale.

"Hi Will," she had said, her voice weary. ( _"She's exhausted."_ Will didn't let himself think too hard about that.) The sound of her voice made his stomach flip ( _traitor_ , he accused), but he steeled himself.

She left _him_. That was the thing. She fucking left fucking him. So she had no right to bat those doe eyes in his direction and look all wounded.

She left so suddenly that it almost gave him whiplash. She was gone, out the door, before he knew what had hit him. For the longest time afterwards he would find things of hers that she had left behind (mostly she had left anything that couldn't be shoved in her work bag. Half empty bottles of perfume, the yogurt that she liked that he bought in bulk, a bottle of her shampoo, and a sweatshirt that she had missed in her rush to get out of the apartment.) By the time he had cooled off, she was gone. Quit her job and turned off her phone. Charlie knew where she was and refused to tell Will, citing a promise made to a distraught MacKenzie (and Will still hadn't forgiven Charlie for not giving him a heads up that Mac was about to board a plane out of the country and out of his life. He wasn't sure what Mac had told him about their fight, but the unimpressed looks that Charlie flashed his way when Will made his pleas told him that Charlie had taken Mac's side and thought Will was a real moron.)

He had known pretty quickly that he had crossed a line. They both had said some things they might regret, but his fuse had always been much shorter than Mac's and he had always been good at wielding words as a weapon. She had been gone before his brain caught up with his mouth and then it was too late.

But still. She could have goddamn stayed. She could have come back, let him explain, let him apologize. What they had had been worth fighting for. Or well, at least _he_ had thought it had been worth fighting for. Mac had split at the first sign of turmoil and he had three long years to work up a healthy amount of bitterness and resentment towards her.

They had been happy. One fight and she hit the bricks. So fuck her.

And now she's back, standing in the newsroom, looking far more beautiful than she has any right to look.

"This is Jim Harper, my senior producer," Mac introduced, but Will barely spared a look in Jim's direction.

"Let's go into my office," he suggested in a voice that didn't leave a whole lot of room for Mac to argue.

"Sure," her tone was reasonable, which only made him more annoyed. "I tried to get a hold of you while you were on vacation, but no one seemed to know how to get in touch with you, or they weren’t willing to tell me," she said. The way that she said it; it wasn’t quite an accusation, but it wasn’t quite _not_ an accusation either.

Vacation. That was one word to use. At the very least it was a forced vacation, ordered by Charlie. (“ _Want to save your job? Get on the goddamn plane. Let me sort things out on this end.”)_ There hadn’t been a whole lot of relaxing going on, not with Will checking his phone for emails and updates every five minutes. Not with Will worrying, and not with the hallucination of MacKenzie burned into his memory ( _It’s not. But it_ _can be_. That would be something that Mac would write. She would have thought it was inspirational. Would have used it to light a fire under his ass.)

"Well, you never tried before to get in touch with me," Will's tone was sharp, as he settled into his chair and reached for a cigarette. "So I'm a little surprised you'd try now. But I guess it's because you need a job." Mac squared her shoulders, flinching only slightly as he threw the words at her.

"You act as if you had nothing to do with our break up," gone is the calm voice, the cool exterior. He's made her angry, he can tell, and _good_.

"I know that we had a fight and then you took off."

"Is that how you remember it?" She asked, crossing her arms over her chest defensively.

"That's how it happened," he shot back. Mac opened her mouth as if she was going to argue and then closed it again.

"Okay, then," she paused. There was a moment where neither one of them said anything, Mac shifting her weight to her other foot (it was something she did, he knew, when she was feeling overwhelmed. It was terrible, really, knowing a person that well inside and out.) "You look good after your vacation. You look rested. I’ve never been to St. Lucia, was it great?" She gave him a small smile, her voice having taken on a sort of forced cheerfulness.

"Yes," he answered immediately, but that wasn’t completely true. What it was was lonely, even if he had taken company with him. He wondered if Mac knew that. Knew that he hadn't been alone.

"You were down there with Erin Andrews. I know it’s none of my business. You can go anywhere with anyone …" She trailed off, giving him a small shrug. So she did know. And it did seem to bother her. He tried to ignore the way a shiver of happiness shot up his spine at that knowledge.

"Thank you again," he dead panned.

"Hey, this can work,” the overly cheerful voice was still there. “In fact, it's gonna work great. I asked my agent to negotiate a three-year contract. You know me, I think that's the longest contract…” He didn’t want to hear about how she had never managed to stay in one place for longer than two years. He _knew_ that. He was painfully aware.

“It's not a three-year contract anymore,” he interrupted, stopping Mac short. She looked confused.

“I'm sorry?”

“Not a three-year contract anymore. It's a 156-week contract that gives me the opportunity to fire you 155 times at the end of each week. We'll wait a few months to make sure it's not a story Bill Carter can shove up my ass. We'll do it, then.” He had rushed straight from Charlie’s office to his agent’s.

She couldn’t stay there. She _couldn’t_. (He couldn’t get the image of her that night out of his head. That last night. The image of her tearful face. Her face mingled with hurt and disbelief. The way that her face had turned stony and she had squared her shoulders and hadn’t said another word as she pushed past him and into the bedroom, grabbing her shoulder bag as she began to shove things into it. He knew that he had fucked up, but he couldn’t find the words to apologize. To tell her that he didn’t mean it, that he loved her. He couldn’t find it in him to beg her stay.)

“How did you get my contract changed?”

“I gave the network back some money off my salary,” Will replied, feigning nonchalance. (She couldn’t stay, she couldn’t).

“How much money?” Mac asked.

“A million dollars a year.” (It was worth it. He wouldn’t survive another scandal. Another hallucination. He wouldn’t survive her being there.)

“You gave back a million dollars a year?”

“Yeah.”

“You paid a million dollars to be able to fire me any time you want?” He knew her well enough to know that she was angry. (Be angry, he thought. Just please leave.)

“$3 million. And not any time I want, just the end of each week.” He watched a thousand different emotions flit across her face.

"How the hell much money do you get paid?" She asked, and Will shrugged without answering. He didn't need to answer her. He didn't owe her anything. She bit her lip (something he used to find adorable. Nope, couldn't think like that. Down that way lead madness.)

Mac took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly.

"Hey, do this to me, do this to me all you want, but you can't do this to them." Will shot her a confused look.

"Who?"

"People followed me here, Jim Harper, my senior producer, bookers, H&A producer, desk editors, field producers..." Mac listed off. Will could care less about those people. MacKenzie needed to leave. It didn't seem like it should be that hard for her. She was good at leaving.

"They can't possibly be my problem."

"Will, come on now." She was giving him _that_ look. The one that signified that she thought he could be doing better, doing more. That look used to inspire him, at the moment it was just really pissing him off.

"What do you want from me, Mackenzie?"

"They're in the process of moving. They've put down security deposits. They found roommates. They're looking at preschools..."

"Yeah, they fucked up, Mac! They trusted you!" Mac blinked at him, looking wounded and surprised and just goddamn it, he hated how his insides twisted at the hurt look on her face.

Her face flushed and she pushed her shoulders back and then leaned forward, laying both palms flat on his desk.

"You don't get to do that," she said, her voice low. "You don't get to pretend that you were the victim. I was there too, Will. I remember every word you said to me." Mac stared him down, and Will stared back, willing himself to not look away from her. Her eyes looked glassy, but she didn't dare cry. Not in front of him.

"For the moment, your people can have their jobs," he finally said, breaking eye contact. Mac straightened, her arms crossing.

"Well, I appreciate that," she said softly.

He remembered every word he said that night, too. Those words haunted him. He remembered flinging them at her, and watching her face crumble. He remembered the suffocating silence as soon as the door had slammed behind her. He remembered crawling into a bottle and emerging days later to find that he was too late. He remembered the aftermath, trying desperately to call her, he could repeat from memory her voicemail messge, he heard it so many times. He could hear the sound of his voice as he begged her to call him back, and let him explain.

She didn't.

She just left. She left.

And here she was now. And goddamn it, she couldn't stay. He'd never survive it.


	2. Day follows day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, you'll notice dialogue from the episode, but things don't quite follow the show, so hang in there. (And I will point out that I rewatched the episode just for you guys, so you know, you're welcome.) 
> 
> And enjoy!

It was too busy, in the aftermath of the BP spill, for the whole situation to feel too awkward.

But there were moments, particularly in those first few days, where Mac wondered what the hell she was doing. Will didn't want her there, and to be perfectly fair, _she_ didn't want to be there either. (It was that goddamn failed psych eval. She was toxic, untouchable, and it had taken her a while to build up the courage to finally call Charlie Skinner to ask if he could put some feelers out for her

"I actually know of a great job for you," Charlie had said.

"That's great! Where?" Mac asked.

"Here," Charlie's reply was sure and swift. "Why don't you come home, kiddo?" It took her a couple of days of weighing the pros and cons to finally call him back and accept the position.)

Will, for his part, was being polite but distant, and she was more than happy to follow his lead.

Only it didn’t quite work, the polite but distant tactic. There was too much between them for her to truly treat Will as if he were just any other anchor and she was just any other EP. It was hard to forget about how they ended now that they were beginning again. Beginning professionally, of course, and only professionally. Mac might still love him ( _always_ , probably, despite herself), but she hadn't forgotten the words that followed her out the door ( _"Fuck you, MacKenzie! Not all of us have been handed everything on a silver fucking platter. Some of us had to work hard for what we've earned. Some of us didn't have Daddy's name to throw around."_ That had only been a fraction of it. That had only been the bitter end, his words slicing through her as he followed out into the hallway, his posture defensive, her finger jamming the elevator button. She had been _done_. One hundred percent done. No one, not even Will McAvoy, was allowed to speak to her that way. She had never heard him like that. Not directed towards her, so bitter and angry, his words spilling out, full of vitriol, and aimed to _hurt_ her.

She had held her head high as she stepped inside the open elevator. She had met his gaze and cooly replied, "Goodbye, Will." She had waited until she had gotten into a taxi before she brought her hands up to her face and wept.)

Will's threat of firing her was still hanging over her head, but she needed this job and she knew him well enough to know that he would be fair. If she did a good job, if she started turning the show into something to be proud of, she was safe.

Mac wasn’t sure where this newfound willingness to pander to the audience had come from, but deep down she knew he believed in the power of the news, in the power of information, just as strongly as she did.

So it was easy. She would stick to work. She was a professional and she could be a professional with Will. Their history was just that. It was in the past. She was a _damn_ good EP, and she was more than capable of producing a good show as long as she kept focused on her end goal and tried not to think too much about how they ended (or worse, how _good_ they had been together).

Only, well, it wasn’t easy. The problem started, as Mac saw it, with Will's insistence that they keep their former relationship quiet. Which was more than fine by her.

"I think most people here know that you and I were together a while ago," Will said after he asked her to step into his office.

"I think so, too." It wasn't a secret. They had been pretty publicly together for two years. All it took was a little bit of Googling to figure that much out. Mac was certain that if her staff was unable to tackle that little bit of research, they were in deep trouble. These were supposed to be investigative journalists.

"I don't want anyone to know why we're not together now," Will said.

"Sure," Mac shrugged.

"I mean no one."

"You think I'm gonna talk about it?" The break up had been one of the defining humiliating moments of Mac's life. As well as one of the most devastating. It wasn't something that she was willingly going to dredge up from the past in order to make small talk.

"I find it hard to predict what you will and won't do," Will shot back and Mac had to bite down a sharp tongued reply. As if their breakup had been _her_ fault. As if he was the only one who had been damaged in the fall out.

"I won't be telling anyone." Except Jim knew, of course. Not all the dirty details, but there had been long, hot nights in the desert where the sky lit up and they talked about all the things that they might have been too embarrassed about to talk about in the daylight. Jim asked her why she was there and she told him; told him about Will and the fight that drove her out of New York City. Jim walked through literal and proverbial fire for her, and he deserved to know why.

"As long as we're straight."

"We are."

"No one," Will's voice was firm and it began to annoy her. "Nothing." She rolled her eyes.

"Just to be clear, you want me - to tell some people, but not everyone," she adopted a mocking tone that she knew would piss him off, and couldn't help the smirk that tugged at her lips when it worked.

"Let's go," he sighed.

And Mac really wanted to keep it from the staff. She wasn’t the type to air her dirty laundry, and she didn’t want to dent Will’s already tarnished reputation.

Two things that she hadn’t been prepared for: technology foiling her at every turn and Sloan Sabbith.

And Mac knew it was unfair to pin the blame on Sloan, who only knew the post-breakup Will (and Mac had heard enough to know that Post-Breakup Will was a _real_ prick. Although, admittedly, Imminent-Breakup Will had been a prick too), and if Mac hadn't been so dead set on trying to rehab Will's image, it would have never happened.

The thing was that Will, despite his flaws and despite the way their relationship ended, was a _good_ man. (And it was that knowledge that made their breakup, the way it happened, even worse. Mac knew that he hadn't meant to cross a line, hadn’t meant to say half of the things that he had said, that part of it was instinct and reaction. Lash out first, lash out hard. It wasn't a realization that had come to her immediately. Maybe if it had she wouldn't have gotten on that plane, but it hadn't. It had come when she had plenty of time to think about how all of her decisions had landed her in Landstuhl, Germany, in a haze of morphine, recovering from a near fatal stabbing.

And she couldn’t quite get out of her head the fact that even if Will hadn’t _meant_ to say the things that he did, there was still a part of him that must have _thought_ those things.)

She tried to get Sloan to understand (mostly she wanted to clear up the rumor that Will had cheated on her. He hadn’t. He would _never_ ), tried to explain that Will was one of the best people she knew.

“You need to do this: you need to go from person to person and tell them that Will is an extraordinary man with a heart the size of a Range Rover, that there's a…a long story that has to do...a lot to do with me, but also other things. I can't tell you the story of his life, but he's a good guy.”

Sloan had looked unconvinced, and MacKenzie couldn’t blame her. There had been nothing in Will’s behavior before her arrival that would point to him being anything but a jerk (and she could still hear his words echoing “ _Fuck you, MacKenzie.”_ His tone so harsh and unflinching), but Will was a lot of things, and he was good, but he was also ten types of fucked up, and almost none of that was his fault.

But Mac couldn’t tell Sloan any of that. What she could do was send an email to Will trying to warn him that the staff thought that he had cheated on her, and asking if he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to just clarify a few things about their breakup.

(“ _We don’t need to tell them all about how we fell apart, that can, and should, stay just between us. But we can put this rumor to rest that you cheated on me. You didn’t. You wouldn’t. You might have said some things that were over the line, but you wouldn’t have ever cheated on me. I know that, Will. And I want you to know that I take my share of the blame in how things ended up. I goaded you. I knew what buttons to push_ _and I pushed them. It took a long time for me to admit that, but there it is. They don’t need to know about your dad, or your past.-- I suppose this might be the wrong time to tell you that I did get your emails. And I read them. And at some point we should talk about that. And about that night. But the point is, let me clear up a few things with the staff. Let me change minds about you.”_ )

It was only supposed to go to Will, but then it went to everyone, and everyone was asking questions about his dad and about their break up, and she had only ever seen Will that angry once before (and Mac might accept _part_ of the blame for their break up. She had pushed him, she had also said things that she probably shouldn't,  but it had been his anger that had done them in. It had been his unwillingness to acknowledge that his past, his childhood, had shaped him in ways that had the potential to derail his life.

It had certainly derailed their relationship.)

And Mac apologized for the email, but she sure as shit wasn't apologizing for more than that. It was _bullshit_ , total and complete, that Will had somehow twisted what had happened that night into her fault. Because she left? Fuck that. He hadn't left her any other options.

She fumed about it all during the show, and Will's refusal to listen to her (goddamn Reese Lansing. This reeked of his doing) compounded her anger (and there was also the whole Jan Brewer fiasco, which she didn't have the energy to worry about too much), and by the end she was so furious she couldn't see straight.

"Are you in or are you out?” If she was going to do this, then she was going to _do_ this. She could have used her father’s name at BBC and gotten a job in London (and wouldn’t that have been ironic? The very thing that Will accused her of doing in the first place, tossing her good breeding and her important family name to get herself a job. But she had been desperate, and just fuck him), but she had come to New York, come back to ACN because she knew that Will had it in him.

Screw the ratings. Screw Reese Lansing. Screw Will for being a coward and a ratings junkie.

“I have to give you credit for thinking you can chew me out - on this particular--” Will was still steaming, she could practically see the smoke pouring from his ears, and Mac recognized that it had been a trying day for all parties involved, but her threshold for bullshit was extra low at the moment, and she felt herself itching to fight back.

“I'll chew you out on any particular day. And by the way, when I say dump out of it, dump out of it. Reese got in your head.”

“I'm don't believe I'm hearing--”

“Yes, we fucked up on a huge subject, but ours was a mistake. Yours was fear, a need to be loved by strangers and not our show. Be the leader, Will. Be the moral center of this show. Be the integrity. Today's Friday. By Monday I want to know are you in or are you out?”

She would call her father if she had to, she could get him to call in a few favors. Her mother had thought she was crazy for not moving back when she got home from Pakistan in the first place, had known just enough about Mac and Will’s breakup to make her displeasure about Mac returning to ACN apparent. Mac would not, no matter how desperate she was, stay here and let Will run rampant over her and everything she believed in.

She was still angry when she climbed in the cab to go home, and still angry when she finally made it up to her apartment, but as soon as the door shut behind her, all the anger and the energy drained out of her and she slid bonelessly to the floor, bringing up her hands to her face and weeping softly.

Jesus Christ, she didn't know if she had it in her to do this.

Her phone rang and she reached blindly for it, squaring her shoulders when she saw Will's name on the screen.

"It's-- it's Will. I'm in."

"What?" it caught her off guard, and she was momentarily thrown.

"I'm in. I'll see you on Monday."

"Are you still gonna worry about the ratings?" She asked.

"Yes." He was infuriating.

"Still gonna worry about being popular?"

"Yeah."

"About being loved by strangers?"

"Are you gonna keep asking me questions that all mean the same thing?" He really should have known better. He knew the answer.

"Till I get the right answer," Mac shot back.

"I'm in." She took a deep breath.

"There it is."

After she hung up, she tipped her head back against the wall and let a small smile creep across her face.

Maybe they could do this after all.


End file.
